Day 2

Thursday, February 13, 2003
Raytheon Amphitheatre

3:00-6:00 pm
Panel 1
"Mapping the New Spaces of the City"

presentations by Roger Sherman (RSh), Richard Sommer (RSo), Chris Reed (CR), with respondents Rosalind Greenstein (RG), Harriet Tregoning (HT), and Alex Krieger (AKr), and moderator Andrea Kahn (AKa) more info

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Presentation #1: Roger Sherman gallery

All right, thank you George. I suspect the reason I’m leading off is probably because what I’m going to show you is kind of, probably intended as a pretext to the projects that you’ll be looking at by Richard and Chris. I wasn’t sure from the program whether or not I should be looking at the mapping part or the new spaces part. I had a project that I was trying to weigh between showing some mapping work that we’ve done and some other projects that we’ve undertaken for sites on more recently, sites such as these post-industrial sites that George has referred to. But I decided in favor of the former because I think that in terms of looking at being able to analyze and understand the terms of the contemporary city and the stakeholders at work that they’re very helpful and illustrative that way, and I think will tie in very well, hopefully, with the discussion that follows of the next day or two.

What I’m going to talk about right now is what I call, not so much ­ this is why it’s kind of a little bit of a predicament because, what the analysis drawings that I’m going to show you really do not describe new spaces as they do existing spaces, but merely find a hidden logic that affects urban form, and that is at work in the city and has been for sometime, but has not really been basically acknowledged by most urban designers as something which does have some impact on the way that our cities get made. So what I’d like to is demonstrate how this will not only be read in urban space, but how its expression is an enrichment of the experience and form of the city. This idea, the logic that I’m referring to, is that of deal making and negotiation.

The first two slide images are of the council-manic districts in the city of Los Angles and then one of them pulled out. Basically, it’s another means of sort of understanding that there are other logics at work than those that urban designers might recognize. Meaning to say that, gerrymandering, which is the primary political means by which deal-making occurs, results in shapes that most urban designers would not necessarily find to be the most rational means of understanding how to democratically divide up a city. And yet it’s a result of the partisan process that we’ve established in a way which differs fundamentally from social democracy in Europe. And so whereas we might not consider these at all rational or logical they actually have a complete ­they are entirely logical, given the assessments of demographics and other kinds of analyses that the various incumbents undertake to understand when they redraw their lines each time that the districts are reset. So it’s this kind of process I’m going to look at. The second place that we see deal making and negotiation is in the form of private property ownership. Where as gerrymandering is actually invisible save for the occasional map, property ownership, though zoning laws have a tendency to try to want to suppress that logic, do end up on especially on marginal sites and the kind of sites we’re going to talk about over the next two days, have an opportunity to make visible basically what amounts to a private form of gerrymandering on each and every property.

The funny thing about property is that we often times like to have an easy way of forgetting that, in fact, that American property law allows for several if not multiple rights holders to an individual property and we’re starkly reminded of that when we wake up one day and we discover that the gas company has dug up our lawn because they have rights to their equipment and can basically access it at will. We also find other subtle places and reminders in the fact that properties themselves are also interconnected with one another other by virtue of sharing the same land owner such as this apartment building which has the sign, “Church of Christ,” with an arrow pointing to the church that’s actually down the street which is basically a kind of subtle indicator that there is a relationship of ownership in property between the apartment building and the church which turns out to be, in fact, the case.

The first of the logics that I’d like to talk about is that of property as a crucible, the idea of land as a commodity. The idea that land is a commodity leads to its becoming a crucible for the working out of differences between the various rights-holders to it. Not only are these things subject to differences between governmental regulations and private desire, but also obviously subject to the kind of whims of the marketplace. The properties therefore are not unlike kind of ecologies that develop with economic dependents where businesses with economic dependencies develop in connection with one another. This is a property in Hollywood in which what has been identified as the fact that a host-body (which in this case is a car wash) brings economic benefit to other smaller dependent franchises with which it has transactions. One of which is kind of an orange BJ, a little stand that people will go to, will make its business by the fact that people are actually getting out of their cars, waiting for their cars, and therefore becoming a kind of target for a business to take advantage of. But it also engages in other kinds of relationships which are non-economic such as this adjacent apartment building which has a kind of stage front that looks out which provides a form of entertainment for the tenants of the apartment building to watch all the cars being customized. At the same time as they give permission for their party-wall to be used as the menu board. So there is actually a kind of transaction going on socially if not economically. The most interesting of these, is actually a curious situation whereby the car wash pulls itself back from the corner of the two busiest streets in order to present a kind of, politically-correct, image of itself as green. The sort of very opposite way people tend to think of a car wash as a kind of polluting enterprise. And so what they do is, they in effect give back a piece of their own land to create the appearance of a widened public right of way, as a kind of sign of public goodness, of public spiritedness as a means of spinning themselves in a way which will put them in a better stead with their neighbors.

Obviously, property is clearly not a sanctum, but part of a web of interests. The notion that we often refer to as highest and best use leads naturally when taken into account with American land use law to a separation of rights from possession. That is to say that although somebody may possess the property they don’t possess all the rights to the property. And as a result of that, and land-use law actually has a name for this, which is called a “bundle of rights.” And what that has the effect of doing is undermining absolute control over property dissolving exclusive ownership to allow for several interests. And there are lots of provisions for this under the law such as profits of prondra, easements, material, mineral and air-rights, servitudes and so on and so forth. What this all acts to initiate the opportunity for an owner to bring in other interested parties onto their own property in order to enhance the overall value of the property. This is actually a diagram of this property whereby you’re able to understand that the value of the property increases monetarily as the owner continues to subdivide it and give over increasing amounts of it to other interested parties. And obviously we see this happen kind of all the time. In the diagram of the left, the same property is shown with a kind of distortion of the relative value of property so that the billboard which only takes up four square feet of property actually, in value, is worth disproportionately more than some of the other things that are on the property. Likewise, when you look at the property relative to the densification of the area in which it sits, the property ends up kind of densifying on a micro-scale, in a way which is reflective of the increasing property values over time of the area as a whole.

That was more of an economic example. This is one which is taken from a reading of Charles Moore’s You Have to Pay for the Public Life in which he looks at the town of Atascadero, just about four hours north of Los Angles. This article was published in about 1962 and I remember reading it a very long time ago. I never forgot this image of this gas station which was built in the middle of a mall. It was supposed to be a kind of civic mall. The problem was that it was actually first developed by a private developer who sought to create the image of civic-ness but neglected to realize that there were some un-exercised rights of development that went along with the property which at some point ended up being exercised by Union 76 when they built their gas station there. So what ends up happening is that when these interests interact with one another, they maneuver around one another in a manner which actually creates this contortedness, which is actually ­ my argument is ­ sort of visually enriching. And moreover, it occurs in such a way that it actually is a lot of one step at a time. It isn’t all planned out at once. What ends up happening as you can see in the slide on the left is that there’s originally the mall designed a certain way. Then the Union 76 station is built. Then the 101 highway cuts across the mall. And finally, in an effort to kind of correct what’s been done, the Union 76 is then bought out so that the vision can be restored and a tunnel is bored under the freeway in order to reconnect the axis. So in other words, This situation very much follows the logic of negotiation which is that one thing follows another. It’s about a move and then a counter-move and a response to that counter-move and so on and so-forth. So like the kid’s game of cat’s cradle, complexity emerges through the negotiation. It isn’t as we planners would like to think, something that is necessarily best created by figuring everything out from the front end. I am actually arguing that, such as the situations such as I’m showing, they are invigorating because they more transparently reflect the real operations that are at work in the city. Than are best efforts to try and conceal these and try to make things look more ordered than they actually are.

This is next slide is in an area called Signal Hill in Los Angeles, actually a small town within Los Angles in which there was a suburban tract development, but Shell Oil still had mineral rights to the ground underneath the tract development so they obviously still had a rig operating next to this home that’s worth about $600,000. They needed an easement in order to allow their truck in order to service the rig, but they wanted to give the appearance that it wasn’t actually an easement so they went to extraordinary efforts to actually continue the lattice-work of the fence that characterizes the neighborhood, around the thing. And actually to plant a square in the center with benches, so as to create an ambiguous situation in which you’re neither sure whether or not that use of land belongs to the oil company, to the house, or actually to the public. I’ve seen it at various times people actually walking their dogs and going around in the U-shape to sit down and look at the oilrig. So the point is that this is more of an accurate manifestation of the messy nature in which the way of cities are made, than in fact the way that we’d like to think about them.

Another situation, which again demonstrates this idea of the back and forth, has to do with a little business Hugo’s Plating. Everyone knows a story such as this, in which Hugo’s Plating would not sell to the developers of the Pacific Design Center. There were two old ladies who just died within the last year. Hugo’s Plating, ironically, well not ironically, but significantly speaking was painted the color blue which the Pacific Design Center has as its color today, but before the Pacific Design Center got there. So what this caterpillar game (this is using language of game theory) explains is a process whereby an effort was made by the Pacific Design Center to figure out how to contend with this business that wouldn’t sell out. So you can see various other design moves­what they do, they try to inflect the steps of the plaza around the business. They also plant trees over at ficus trees which cast a really dark shadow so as to basically camouflage the evidence of the presence of that business from the point of view of the Pacific Design Center. This is another diagram which shows the fact that the only curb-cut is for this little business, amidst otherwise a pedestrian-organized situation. I think what’s interesting about this is that, again I would argue, that this urbanism is a richer urbanism than had the Pacific Design Center not had sand in its oyster and been agitated. Because it actually allows one to appreciate the circumstances under which one kind of entity in the city is allowed to coexist with a very different type of entity.

One of the most interesting examples of this is something that most people in Los Angles who commute who commute back and forth on Olympic Boulevard see everyday and never quite know what it is. It looks actually like an obelisk and it’s actually very close to that shape. It actually turns out that it’s an old derrick, but which is no longer operating for oil. But the company needs to keep the derrick on its property in order to preserve the right to drill further at whatever time it should choose to do so. So this set of operations, of back and forth, which describes the negotiation, talks about how that there was never a problem with that oil derrick being there when there was no Century City around it. The oil derrick predated everything else that came with it. I’m hoping that the idea these industrial sites will begin to make some sense in the context of examples such as this. When Century City came along, people were bothered by its unsightliness and the nuisance that the noise represented. As a result of that, they covered the derrick with acoustical padding which is why you no longer see the steel armature. At that point, there was an artist would came along (I’m going to describe that in these drawings) and realized it was an opportunity that it actually was as we call an accidental obelisk. Which is that even though it wasn’t intended as a public monument, it became public de facto through its presence at the terminus of Olympic Boulevard where it leaves Beverly Hills and as you enter Beverly Hills. And so he actually applied for money and received grants to take down all the acoustical padding and to circulate each pad to different pediatric cancer wards around the state of California wherein children would paint flowers on it according to his design and then it would be re-clad. So that, in effect, what was originally an oil derrick became re-appropriated as a symbol to pediatric cancer. So what you end up getting is a kind of interesting overlay of interests that all become imbedded in that piece, not the least of which is the fact that the owner of the oil company has his office in one of the Century City towers, that he can look out to see the kind of the obelisk to his own fortune. While the other, it serves as a kind of municipal outpost as well. So you have three or four kinds of interests that all kind of come together and are done without the thing having been planned.

The most complex example of these things is what I would refer to as a kind of rebus. They’re like puzzles that you need to figure out. But, again, their complexity has a kind of compelling quality about it.) is a large property, again, down near Long Beach which is dotted with still operating oilrigs. Amidst these oil rigs is a café, Curly’s Café, which has become a landmark in Los Angles, not because there is anything special about the food or the ambiance within the café, but actually because of the fact that the oil rigs sit in the parking lot. And it actually has lead to a really sort of fascinating degree of success for the café, because they’ve become so well known by virtue of their association with it. This is a multiple exchange diagram in which goods and services and money and favors and rights amidst a number of different businesses which occupy this larger site, actually go on. The café actually celebrates the presence of the oilrigs in its interior decorative scheme: the frosted glass that separates the booths, and in fact, welcomes the association with the rigs. But what’s more important here, is that in tracking the history of the site, one actually realizes that the rigs had been repositioned differently on a cardinal north-south orientation at one point prior to the existence of the café. And when the café came there was a conflict between the turning radii that were needed for the rigs to be serviced by these long trucks, and the parking lot that was used by Curly’s so that the rigs needed to be rotated in order to accommodate the different criteria of both the cars that were in the parking lot and the rigs that were backing up to service it. To make matters more interesting, Curly’s, which is in the diagram on the right, the empty, the kind of irregularly shaped light-grey box, did its banking at a bank just to the right of that. And in order to facilitate that, they actually carved what’s called “Turner’s Pass.” (He was the original owner of the café.) through the hedgerow between the bank and the oilrigs to screen the oilrigs from the view of the bank because they didn’t want to be associated with this kind of a grimy profession. And so the employees of the bank would come to Curly’s through Turner’s Pass to have lunch, and then the people at Curly’s would actually do their banking by short-cutting through the Turner’s Pass. There’s a complex intermingling of three different interests. On the other side of the bank, meanwhile, to the right of the bank, the bank was expanding and needed to get built more parking. But the land to the right of them was owned by two houses; two private residences. And the first of the owners who owned the land, immediately next to them, would not sell their land to them at the time, but they would give them the rights of access across an easement. So the bank bought the land from the one that was one over from the bank and then built an easement across the parking lot in order to allow the remote parking lot to have a sense of greater connection to the bank. As I was alluding to, like a game of twister, all the interests end up becoming kind of enwrapped in one another creating this entirely contorted appearance so that even today (once the bank was finally able to buy the other property they weren’t able to have) they kept the easement, or the construction that represented the easement the landscaped way.

Finally, an example of a house. This is kind of another one having to do with greed but using an interesting tit for tat relationship between parties, whereby the billboard I’m showing you on the left actually is used as (this house faces south) so it’s actually adopted as a shade structure and one that actually lends privacy to the porch at the front of the house which you can see on the left side. At the same time, it causes a kind of interesting interaction between itself and the house whereby the billboard actually has to modify itself given its ordinary behavior. On the bottom, the ladder has to extend out over where it can connect to the public right of way for access. At the same time, the stanchions of the billboard cause deformation in the entry sequence, getting into the house. So in fact the friction causes a deformation in the character of the way in which each thing operates. Which is just another fancy way of saying that these parties affected one another. It’s one thing to put two things side by side and saying, “Isn’t it nice that we’re mixing uses,” and it’s another thing to say, “You’ve got to work it out, and you’re going to have to do things a little bit differently as a result of the fact that you have this conflict.”

I wanted to talk for a minute about the implications for practice, for architecture and urban design practice having to do with this idea that I call transparency. What we’re looking at is a baseball park that was built by the guy who owns one of these two suburban homes around a cul-de-sac in Los Angles. His name is Rick Mussina and he’s the agent for Drew Carey and Tim (what’s his name, you know from Home Improvement) [Allen]. He represents a bunch of talent, as they say in the business. He is, and this is important, at nature a deal maker and so it was very natural to him to think about how about how he could make better use of his side yard, by offering an opportunity to his neighbor, if his neighbor was willing to give him his side yard, to actually create this kind of de facto public space between the two properties and make better use of the pie-sliced property that they shared. And so he constructed this field, which is actually a kind of professional wiffle-ball field. He advertises for several of the liquor companies that supply him with stuff in his own private bar, which is inside with a kind of remote monitors which view the game. And then finally, he ended up building a bridge across from his neighbor’s house to his, over home plate which is where he set up the broadcast booths so that his clients who all get together on Sunday afternoons can actually broadcast the games and so on.

But I think that when one thinks about the possibilities of what we’re looking at, these kinds of strange or leftover spaces in the city, I’m not sure. My feeling is that the nature of their public-ness may not be so much relying upon always needing a public agency to facilitate the process but rather to believe in the fact that the interaction between private entities itself constitutes something of public record, and thereby makes those spaces public. This puts the urban designer in the position of reveling in, if you will, a radical acceptance of circumstance, which these diagrams demonstrate. And in which the ideas of urban design are no longer a matter of ideology (where “what I think” matters). But by my acting as an interlocutor or mediator between these various interests, I can actually identify the ties that bind parties together in the city, the ones that we might not ordinarily see but which exist there, and to reveal forms of accumulation and interconnection of men and women that are often not visible. So I think the time is done for us saying, for us politicizing a position for urban design and actually to become directly involved in the politics of property and to become reconnected with the political through that means. Thank you.